This intermediate textbook continues to develop students’ skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing Vietnamese at the second-year language learning level. The book is presented as a linguistic and cultural journey of a family through twelve selected cities in Vietnam. Each chapter is organized into sections on dialogue, grammar, reading, practice exercises, and vocabulary.
A vivid, accessible portrait of contemporary Vietnam through texts and complementary photographs that dispute the stereotypic images we have of this dynamic and diverse country.
During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life. With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.
Vietnam is increasingly opening up to the West, and society is in flux between tradition and modernity, and capitalism and socialism. Americans have distanced themselves from the Vietnam War now, and Culture and Customs of Vietnam fills a need to learn about the country, which has also evolved. Readers will find that this is the only general book on Vietnamese culture in English written by specialists. McLeod and Nguyen, historians specializing in Vietnam engagingly show the various forces of Vietnamese culture in narrative chapters on the land, people, and language; history and institutions; thought and religion; literature; art and architecture; cuisine; family, marriage, gender, and youth culture; festivals and leisure activities, and performing arts. Culture and Customs of Vietnam is a comprehensive, one-stop source, providing the most useful and intriguing information for students and general readers. Some of the highlights include the discussion of the Chinese influence in writing, thought, and religion; eating habits; the changing family; and water puppetry. A chronology, glossary, and numerous photos complement the text.
Beyond the Bronze Pillars is an innovative and iconoclastic look at the politico-cultural relationship between Vietnam and China in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Overturning the established view that historically the Vietnamese sought to maintain a separate cultural identity and engaged in tributary relations with the Middle Kingdom solely to avoid invasion, Liam Kelley shows how Vietnamese literati sought to unify their cultural practices with those in China while fully recognizing their country’s political subservience. He does so by examining a body of writings known as Vietnamese "envoy poetry." Far from advocating their own cultural distinctiveness, Vietnamese envoy poets expressed a profound identification with what we would now call the Sinitic world and their political status as vassals in it. In mining a body of rich primary sources that no Western historian has previously employed, Kelley provides startling insights into the pre-modern Vietnamese view of their world and its politico-cultural relationship with China.
This first-year Vietnamese language textbook introduces college students to all aspects of the Vietnamese language and culture in twelve comprehensive chapters. Each chapter begins with a list of active vocabulary used for the selected topic, followed by dialogue and grammar utilized in everyday situations by native speakers. A Vietnamese proverb reflecting each chapter’s topic reveals a different cultural component of Vietnam. Students can practice what they’ve learned with exercises at the end of each chapter. The book is enhanced with an answer key to the exercises, grammar indices, and full vocabulary lists.
